They had gotten the time difference wrong and it arrived at eight o’clock in the morning.Ĭolvin is widely regarded as the finest war correspondent - “if we can call ourselves that,” as she said ruefully in an interview - of her generation. Afterward, recovering in a New York hotel, friends from a previous assignment sent a trolley filled with fabulous vodkas of all kinds. This biographical detail was added by her editor to a dispatch she filed after losing sight in one eye. She chain-smoked and mixed a mean vodka martini.
She gave great parties where she wore small black dresses. She pointed out it had been cream before it was soaked in her blood. She was commissioned to write about her “lucky red bra” (after being hit by a government grenade in Sri Lanka). She claimed it on expenses (after it was looted from her hotel room in Indonesia). In Extremis is the story of our turbulent age, and the life of a woman who defied convention.MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of Marie Colvin’s underwear. Drawing on unpublished diaries and interviews with Marie's friends, family and colleagues, Hilsum conjures a fiercely compassionate, complex woman who was driven to an extraordinary life and tragic death.
Written by fellow foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum, this is the story of the most daring war reporter of her time. She was much admired, and as famous for her wild parties as for the extraordinary lengths to which she went to tell the story, including being smuggled into Syria where she was killed in 2012. Her anecdotes about encounters with dictators and presidents - including Colonel Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat, whom she knew well - were incomparable. Marie covered the major conflicts of our time- Israel and Palestine, Chechnya, East Timor, Sri Lanka - where she was hit by a grenade and lost sight in her left eye, resulting in her trademark eye-patch - Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like her hero, the legendary reporter Martha Gellhorn, she sought to bear witness to the horrifying truths of war, to write 'the first draft of history' and to shine a light on the suffering of ordinary people. She reported from the most dangerous places in the world, going in further and staying longer than anyone else.
Marie Colvin was glamorous, hard-drinking, braver than the boys, with a troubled and rackety personal life.
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